Main Street surface to remain as is, mayor says

Monday

Jun 24, 2013 at 5:09 PM

The new Main Street surface that many citizens are complaining about will remain in its current form, but transportation officials will help the city “beautify” the area, Lexington's mayor said Monday.

BY NASH DUNNThe Dispatch

The new Main Street surface that many citizens are complaining about will remain in its current form, but transportation officials will help the city “beautify” the area, Lexington's mayor said Monday.Lexington Mayor Newell Clark and North Carolina Department of Transportation Division 9 Engineer Pat Ivey met Monday morning about the resurfacing project that has seemed to confuse and frustrate residents in recent weeks.Clark said while the road's surface will remain the same, the DOT agreed to help the city with beautification projects on Main Street and open better lines of communication.“They are going to get with our staff and look and see what, if possible, we can do, because obviously we are not pleased with the look of Main Street now,” Clark said, adding that those discussions will start next week.The project, which also called for the resurfacing of Fifth Avenue, was originally described as minor repairs to the pavement to ensure it serves as a good foundation for the new layer of asphalt, according to a news release dated April 12.However, last week, a DOT official said crews used a maintenance method called micro-surfacing for the project, which differs from traditional hot-mix asphalt surfacing and uses dense-graded aggregate, asphalt emulsion, water and mineral fillers to seal and extend the life of roads.When the main surfacing work was completed, citizens and merchants said they were not pleased, speaking out that the road looked different than a traditional asphalt surfacing job with grooves and a slightly rocky surface. In addition, loose rock and dirt on the surface of the road, which was used during construction to allow traffic to pass through the area, remained longer than normal after a traffic accident totaled a road sweeper used to pick up the materials.Citizens who weren't pleased with the surface thought another layer of asphalt was going to be applied. However, that wasn't the case.In addition, the N.C. Criterium State Championships, a bike race scheduled to be held in uptown July 12 and 13, was relocated to Winston-Salem because of the road's potential impact on the riders.“We acknowledge that communication to the city and the community was less than desired, especially since this is a different type of road treatment than we have used in the past,” Ivey said Monday. “I have taken steps in the division to make sure that doesn't occur in the future to make sure we work with Lexington and other cities in our division to make sure everyone understands exactly what is going on and why we make the decisions that we do.”As far as helping the city improve the aesthetic quality of the downtown area, Ivey said his division looks forward to continuing discussions with the city that could include landscaping additions or special crosswalk markings.“My commitment to the mayor and city manager was to sit down and work through whatever improvements may be necessary and hopefully implement them before the Barbecue Festival,” Ivey said.Cost savings and road preservation were the two main reasons the DOT chose micro-surfacing for Main Street and Fifth Avenue, Mark Crook, a Davidson County DOT maintenance engineer, said last week. Micro-surfacing is a third of the cost of the traditional hot-mix method, he said, adding that the road can be preserved for about five years.Crook said that micro-surfacing has been used on a residential community in Davie County, in addition to a resurfacing project on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Winston-Salem. Clark said Ivey reiterated that Lexington was not slighted.“They said this technique will be used more and more across the state simply for budgetary reasons,” Clark said, adding that DOT officials see it as a cost-effective preservation technique.

Nash Dunn can be reached at 249-3981, ext. 227, or at nash.dunn@the-dispatch.com.